Memos on Cultivating Neighbourly Bonds: Lessons from African Oral Traditions — Epoche C1
Memorandum: subject, and a correction to its own premise Subject: priorities and codes of conduct for relations with neighbours, drawn from African oral traditions. An earlier version of this memo listed four proverbs and extracted from them four priorities for neighbourly conduct. Checking the proverbs before circulating the advice reveals that two of the four are not African in origin, one cannot be verified in the form quoted, and the fourth is genuine but does not mean what the memo took it to mean. Worse, the extraction itself — pulling sayings out of use and lining them up as principles — is the specific error that the standard scholarship on African oral literature warns against. This revision therefore does three things: it corrects the sources, it sets out what proverbs actually do in the traditions that use them, and it rebuilds the recommendations on evidence about which neighbourhoods in fact supply the support the memo wants. The conclusion is not that the original advice was wrong. Most of it survives. But its grounds change, and with them two of its instructions. What a proverb does, and why a list of proverbs is not a code Finnegan's Oral Literature in Africa (1970) remains the standard survey of the field, and its treatment of proverbs contains the argument that governs everything else here. Her central methodological point is that a proverb has no fixed meaning independent of the occasion of its use. It is a resource deployed in a particular situation by a particular speaker to make a particular move — to close an argument, to rebuke without naming, to justify a decision already taken, to advise obliquely where direct advice would give offence. The same proverb can be produced by opposing parties in the same dispute, each applying it to the facts as they see them, and both usages are correct. Finnegan is explicit that collections which strip proverbs from their contexts of use, and then present them as a people's philosophy, misrepresent both the sayings and the societies that use them. The traditions say this about themselves. A widely quoted Yoruba proverb runs, in translation, that a proverb is the horse of speech: when speech is lost, the proverb is what one rides out to hunt for it. The image is of a retrieval device and a vehicle — something that carries an argument to where it needs to go — not of a rule to be obeyed. Verbal skill in these traditions consists in choosing the apt proverb for the moment and applying it, which is a judgement about the situation, and a stock of proverbs without that judgement is inert. The consequence for this memo is uncomfortable but should be stated plainly. Numbering proverbs into priorities converts a rhetorical repertoire into a code of conduct, which is a change of genre and not a translation. Whatever authority the resulting list has, it does not inherit it from the traditions; it has to earn it on the ordinary grounds that any practical advice does. The rest of this memo tries to supply those grounds. Where the four sayings actually come from Taking them in the order the earlier version gave them: "A neighbour is better than a brother far away" was presented as the summary claim of African oral culture. Its best-known attestation is Hebrew wisdom literature: Proverbs 27:10 ends "better is a neighbour that is near than a brother far off". The thought is a widespread commonplace, and versions of it certainly circulate in African languages; what it is not is distinctively African, and it should not be used as evidence that these traditions hold a view others do not. "When your neighbour's house is on fire, you should help to put it out" was attributed to the Akan. A close parallel is one of the best-known tags in Latin literature: Horace, in Epistles 1.18, line 84, writes that it is your own affair that is at stake when your neighbour's wall is burning. Note that Horace's version carries a different argument — it appeals to the helper's self-interest, not to solidarity — which is a useful demonstration of how much the same image can be made to do. "A good word is like a healing balm" was attributed to the Yoruba. I have not been able to verify it in that form or that attribution, and it is withdrawn. The point it was carrying — that grievances handled early through direct speech do less damage than grievances left to accumulate — stands on its own and does not need a proverb behind it. "Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu" is genuine Nguni, current in Zulu and, as umntu ngumntu ngabantu , in Xhosa, and its usual rendering — a person is a person through other persons — is fair. What follows from it is the subject of the next section, and it is less than the earlier version assumed. Ubuntu: how old the doctrine is, and what it entails The earlier version called these principles timeless. For the ubuntu maxim specifically, that is checkable, and it has been checked. Gade (2011) traced the written record of the term and of the discourses built on it, and found the earliest written occurrences dating from the mid-nineteenth century — 1846 in his account — with the elaboration of ubuntu as a distinct ethical and political doctrine occurring largely in the twentieth century, and its most influential formulations emerging in southern Africa from the 1950s onward and then intensively during South Africa's political transition in the 1990s. The saying is older than its written record, certainly; but the doctrine that has been built on it, the one this memo would be drawing on, is a modern intellectual project with a datable history and internal disagreements. Calling it timeless removes exactly the information that would let a reader assess it. There is also a gap in the inference that the earlier version stepped over. "A person is a person through other persons" is, on its face, a claim about how personhood is constituted — that one becomes a full person through relationships, upbringing, recognition and participation. That is a descriptive and me